Peasant Sly Confinement

Worn universality from broken EGR valves and grease and philosophy

"...Well, the people of the outside world were no less proud of their bad manners, of their lack of culture and coarse vulgar humor, their peasant-sly confinement to practical, selfish aims, so that they appeared no less precious, sanctimonious and eclectic in their narrow-minded naturalness than the most affected Waldzellian prize scholar."
Plinio to Joseph when he confesses that his criticism of the monastic, reflective, ponderous, Castalian Life was premature.



Yes, the people of the world are coarse and narrow minded. Their blighted worldview hardly changes from one generation to the next. Their trucks and cars all evolve on separate tracks than their mental paradigm. I'll join this crowd inwardly, which is the most dangerous of all paths. Outwardly, I danced with convention but rarely slept with her. Inwardly I've always resisted the mob mentality of spawned fish sitting in traffic with cell phones all returning to the same stream each day to give birth to useless ideas and more waste paper. Even in Los Angeles I rode a motorcycle that was originally won on The Price is Right and strapped $8000 worth of boutique guitar effects pedals to the luggage rack each week. I sat in traffic but not for long. Now I'm one of the working boys on the outside and bit by bit the metamorphosis is changing my worldview on the inside. Again, the nature of the dangerous environment and deadly conditions require total focus. Forgive me, friends and lovers, if I stop thinking about you 24 hours a day. It does not mean I am not devoted to you but I can not have it both ways any more. I am either fully present in the respirator hovering over the gaseous vat of death as I dangle by my toes and attach wire straps and screw tiny wires into holes, or I'll die.

Let it go on the record that I mentally juggled my resentments and regrets and fantasies and friends and Spanish Moss-haired Minx Gypsies all day long in my cavernous van...for years...but those days must end and at the end of a hard day on the hydro-fracturing oil well I reflect, "I haven't thought about her in hours," and a chill passes through my neck because it's the same as saying, "I have no past and no future, only a present devoted to oil and natural gas." And I wonder if it's better or much worse.

What is love but unhealthy devotion and perennial obsession? That's what I learned in school. Is that wrong? As my memory is supplanted by my present predicament I cry false tears of despair that I may be forgiven or at least allowed a few hours (12) per day to concentrate only on my near death and threat of death. I've been given a choice of life without a memory or death with a fragrant name drifting from my chilled lips. How can I choose without first asking for forgiveness? Everyone forgive me as your memory is eradicated by hogs lying dead in the road and a roaring flame of gas venting into the poisoned atmosphere. I can not justify the virtual altar that I have been keeping lone vigil over these long years. The lover's cross must be used as firewood.

The gas flare of my heart must be extinguished.

The world rewards reckless industry and disdains the poet's altar erected for lonely affairs and philosophical predictions. Family and industry are the fuels of civilization. Despair is for cemetery ghosts and owls hunting in the night.